fas Nv LUCTUS SULLA The Deadly Reformer E, BADIAN Professor of Classics and History in the State University of New York at Buffalo THE SEVENTH TODD MEMORIAL LECTURE DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY II SEPTEMBER 1969 SYDNEY UNIVERSITY PRESSSYDNEY UNIVERSITY PRESS Press Building, University of Sydney Great Britain, Europe, North America INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARLY BOOK SERVICES, INC. THE TODD MEMORIAL LECTURES were founded in 1944, in memory of FREDERICK AUGUSTUS TODD Professor of Latin in the University of Sydney from 1922 to 1944 First published 1970 © Ernst Badian 1970 Library of Congress Catalog Gard Number 71-131956 National Library of Australia registry number and ISBN 0 424 06090 6 Printed in Australia by Hogbin, Poole (Printers) Pty Ltd, Redfern, N,S.W. and registered in Australia for transmission by post as a book. Lucius Sulla T is by now an outstanding honour to be invited to give a lecture in this series, which has established itself as among the leaders in its field—a worthy memorial to Professor Todd, who, quite apart from his own meritorious work on the novel, laid the foundations of the international standing that this Uni- versity has acquired in the study of both Latin and Ancient His- tory. Since Professor R. E. Smith, then Professor of Latin here, inaugurated the series with one of his best papers, there have been five lecturers. They comprise an Oxford Professor, two Cambridge Professors, a Provost of King’s, three Knights and a CBE. And here am I, a resident alien in the United States and a Professor at a university only founded as such in 1948, standing in the same place. If I cannot equal the performance of my pre- decessors (and let me, without disparaging the others, pay a special tribute to the outstanding one of Professor Sir Ronald Syme), I must at least attempt to justify the honour you have paid me by choosing a subject that is surely second to none in the field of Roman history in both importance and interest. It should now be a truism that the historian must not claim to give the explanation of a complex historical phenomenon. Such questions as, ‘What were the causes of the Great War?’ (or, ‘of the fall of the Roman Republic?)—expecting, by implication, a list of neatly defined items—such questions are by now rele- gated to the privacy of the tutorial or the examination room, where the historian is shielded from the critical eye of his pro- fessional colleagues. But it is the historian’s legitimate task to single out some of the strands in the complex weave and to trace their importance in the pattern; and it is in this humbler frame of mind that he will most usefully perform his proper task of letting the present and the past illuminate each other. The story of Lucius Sulla arouses interest on many counts. The ruthless adventurer and sinister_tyrant, transformed by success into a revered statesman, with (perhaps) uneasy doubts to gnaw at the faithful after his death—that figure i; 6 eran ERS LON LIBRARIES LF Grorcthour age, so much so that we need hardly mention names; even though, as far as we can tell, the pattern repeats itself without becoming familiar to contemporaries.! Interest is added by the nature of our sources, which have bedevilled the study of Sulla more than that of most Roman leaders of the Republic, Sulla wrote an autobiography, which he finished towards the end of his life; and this far from unbiased document was one of the main sources of information of his later biographer Plutarch, and has left noticeable traces in Appian and (as far as we can tell) in Livy. The effect was reinforced by the interested panegyric of an eminent contemporary, long renowned as the most accom- plished Roman historian up to his time, L. Cornelius Sisenna, who joined Sulla’s victorious cause at a late stage and made up for tardiness by enthusiasm. For the period from the Social War down to Sulla’s victory, his account was never superseded except (perhaps) by Livy, who is demonstrably based on him to a con- siderable extent.? Posterity, while in principle sometimes prepared to concede the bias (and sometimes eager to defend it), has in practice been happy to accept what was offered, meeting revalu- ation with shocked resistance. But for better or for worse, the historian cannot abdicate his responsibility, ~ Lucius Cornelius Sulla, born (probably) 138nc,* was of ancient Patrician ineage—of that immemorial aristocracy which went back to the origins of the city and beyond—and he was proud of it. In his autobiography, he seems to have deyoted about two books to the story of his ancestors,4 One ancestor, in the direct line, was P. Cornelius Rufinus, twice consul and dictator in the time of the Samnite and Pyrrhic Wars, who was expelled from the Senate by his enemy C. Fabricius—it was said, for owning more 1 It might be mentioned that this Lecture was delivered not long after the announcement of the death of Ho Chi Minh and the consequent lauda- tions. 21 showed this in the paper now in my Studies in Greek and Roman History (1964) [henceforth Studies] 208f. The only objection raised (Candiloro, SCO 1963, 224f.; repeated Balsdon, JRS 1965, 231) is (I think) demolished Athenaeum 1964, 422f. (not yet known to Balsdon). 8 The date can be deduced from the fact that he stood for the practorship in 99, for 98 (see below). The sources (collected RE, s.v. ‘Cornelius’, no. 392) offer the usual vagueness due to ambiguity in the use of ordinal or cardinal numbers in stating ages. Most of the evidence is collected in RE, lc. and will not be cited here, except where the details are particu- larly important or controversial, * Fragments of the work in Peter, HRR i® 195£.3 useful discussion CCLXXE. Fr. 2, mentioning the flamen Dialis (of about the middle of the third century), is quoted from Book ii. 4 than ten pounds of silver plate.’ The family tradition obviously included luxury! Rufinus’ expulsion meant political eclipse for his immediate descendants, though social eminence was retained: his son, it seems, was flamen Dialis (a post that, while conferring high rank, almost debarred its holder from political activity), and that priest’s son began the slow climb back to power by being praetor; of his sons, two reached the same level. It was the elder of these two men—a great-grandson of Rufinus—who was the dictator's grandfather: this P. Sulla was praetor in 186. The family was.settled in practorian status for generations, but (it seemed) unable to advance any higher, like so many families, old and new, at all periods of the Republic.? Of L. Sulla’s father we know nothing. He himself is said to have spent his youth in dire poverty; yet his father married (after L. Sulla’s mother) a wealthy wife, who later left her stepson a fortune; and the young man, of course, had a literary and Greck education such as befitted one of his class.8 His poverty and his father’s obscurity may be exaggerated: one would think that a son, grandson and great-grandson of praetors, who in (at earliest) his second mar- riage landed an heiress, must have got somewhere in life and must have had more than a name to offer her family. He probably held some public office—even a practorship need not surprise us, in the period for which we lack Livy's evidence. As for his son’s biographers, the peripeteia of the self-made man, especially if (paradoxically) he is of high birth, has always been the stock- in-trade of romantic biography; nor was it unknown even to autobiography. While Sulla was a boy, another Patrician, of more obviously decayed family, had been making his way to the top with single-minded ambition, to become Senior Senator and, for twenty-five years, politically perhaps the most powerful man of his generation. M. Aemilius Scaurus did not let people forget his success, At the beginning of his own autobiography (probably written in the nineties) he stressed the fact that his father had left him practically nothing: six slaves and 35,000 sesterces.* 5 A favourite story in moralists. See RE, s.v. ‘Comelius’, col. 1423. On the family, see RE, sv. ‘Cormelius’, coll. 1513f. The taboos of the priest of Jupiter will be found in any handbook, eg. Wissowa, Rel. 1. Rultus d. Rémer® 102. 7 Best known, perhaps, the Murenae (Cic. Mur. I5f.); but examples are easy to find, (Note the Tremellii, Varro, 1.7. #i 4, 2—seven generations of praetors.) 8 Sall. Jug. 95,3 states what we could in any case deduce, Fr L(p. 185) P. 3 u 5 j